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Friday, December 21, 2012

The Juniors take the spotlight

Hockey starved fans will find some relief with the Christmas Holidays about to arrive, as the annual holiday ritual of the World Junior Hockey Tournament is once again upon us.

The World Junior has long been a mainstay on Canadian viewing schedules, though the early, early morning start times (4AM ET, 1 AM PT) will probably test the resolve of some, still the tournament has long been one of TSN's most popular programming options and one which regularly brings in huge viewership for the Sports network.

This year's festival of puck is coming from Russia, the tournament which in the last few years had set up residence returns to the other side of the ocean, it will be with interest that we watch the attendance figures, these trips to Europe in the past haven't had quite the same interest with fans as the Canadian hosted events.

The World Junior's for whatever reason seems to have been adopted by Canadians as one of the more important of hockey tournaments that there are, perhaps it's all those years of minor hockey tournaments that have Canadians conditioned such, regardless of the reasons if it wasn't for Canadian hockey fans we imagine the tournament would be the thing of sports network crawler alerts and little more.

The tournament gets underway on Boxing Day, the pre tournament games already underway as the North American teams try to get their skating legs up to speed before the real drama gets underway once the Christmas presents have been unwrapped.

Both Canada and the USA are in Group B, Canada opens up the tournament on Boxing Day with a match up with the German team, the USA won't see action until Thursday when they also draw the Germans to get things underway.